The September 1978 collision and subsequent crash of Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 182 and a Cesena in the urban North Park area of San Diego still cast a large shadow over the neighborhood. The destruction and aftermath of the accident are the common threads that tie together the stories in Bonnie ZoBell’s excellent book, What Happened Here.

I was walking around Washington, D.C., my hometown and the city where I lived for 34 years, while reading Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. I imagined all the selves I had been while walking on a few blocks full of my own, my family’s and my country’s history.

The man I love and share my life with is an incredibly kind person who usually makes me a healthy, delicious smoothie in the morning and leaves it in the fridge for me for when I wake up, usually an hour or two later than he does.

Structures glisten. Naked trees drip with clear popsicles. We find ourselves alone with ourselves. Everyone else has gone away to someplace warmer/better/more fun or else they are tucked indoors. Even when you live in a relatively warm place, winter still haunts.

There are picnics where people discuss how long the potato salad can be out in the heat and there are picnics where people discuss Wittgenstein. At Wittgenstein picnics, the people are drinking red wine.

White wine is a kiss; red wine is sex. You can imagine Simone de Beauvoir with red wine in her Paris apartment.

Revolution begins with devotion to a moral vision and a belief that egregious wrongs must be made right. In this way all revolutions are a revolution within. These days, there is both revolution in the air and a fear that not enough of us are outraged.

Pastoral. For a long time we’ve thought of that simply as pastures, poetry about streams and paintings of lush, lime green grass. Cows. Works by Virgil. A certain longing for the countryside. Shepherds. Hills rather than towns.

Anna March's novel The Diary of Suzanne Frank is forthcoming. Her non-fiction, reviews, stories, playlists and poetry have appeared in New York Magazine, Salon, and a wide variety of other publications and she has been nominated for a Pushcart. She is currently at work on a memoir. Read more at annamarch.com. Email her at anna@annamarch.com, and follow her on Twitter @annamarch.

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